Well, here we are in mid-January and I've finished all this winter's work on the bike. In November I turned 65 and retired - got this present from my (older) brother, the bastard! I'll get him for this!
But this from the kids. They know me so well:
I got over the damper mount problem by making a little bracket from a piece of scrap steel I had. Here it is test-fitted, before cleanup and paint:
The fork brace never came from Caferacerwebshop. I queried it of course and a very prompt and polite reply said Tarozzi were having manufacturing problems and what would I like to do? I wasn't in any hurry so decided to wait it out, curious as to how long it would take. After 3 months I gave up and emailed them to cancel the order which they did amazingly quickly - the money was back in my account within 20 minutes or so of sending the email. I think they could be better at liaising with customers when there are problems but I can't fault their responsiveness.
So I bought a Fastec brace from the UK.
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I rebuilt the forks with new top bushes and Race Tech springs & emulators so that's it for the front end.
While things were apart I decided to replace the coil. At tickover, there is a steady beat from the left but some stumbling on the right, it's always been like that since I've had it, so thought I'd remove the coil and HT leads as possible sources of the problem. Naturally sod's law came into play and it's just the same now!
New coil had an interesting feature that made mounting it slightly awkward but some creativity with bolts & washers sorted things out:
Next was the TX750 swingarm. I got this Polisport chain slider to protect things and drilled & tapped M6 holes to mount it - squeezing little grommets into the mounting holes with washers either side worked pretty well. I cut the bottom off of course, there's no need for that bit:
It ends up looking like this:
One thing to watch out for when mounting the TX750 swing arm is the clevis pin at the front end of the rear brake rod. It needs reversing to clear the swingarm, otherwise your nice new powder coating gets a gouge in it. Grrrrr .....
Another gotcha is when drilling to fit a grease nipple, the nipple thread isn't long enough to bridge the bracing fillet and into the actual tube so I had to drill & tap it to M8 and Loctite in an M8 to M6 thread reducer. Here it is when I discovered the problem:
There's also a new BT46 (successor to the BT45) on the rear and it all feels really nice and taut on the road. We've had a lot of rain lately and the roads are covered in 9 kinds of crap so I haven't done more than get a feel for things but that has been very positive, it feels great! And bloody well should do after all that effort! Here we are after today's 35-mile runaround and yes it now needs cleaning:
Oh, and I discovered you get a 0.2V drop when turning on the headlight rather than a 2V one when switching from a 'normal' H4 to an LED bulb.
So what's next I hear you ask? Fit the new carb intake boots when they arrive from Sumo Rubber as that will eliminate leakage through cracked old rubber from the uneven tickover problem, and maybe have a stab at balancing the carbs which is something I've not felt the need to do so far as it all goes so well when off tickover. Apart from that, clean it and ride it!
Here's many happy miles for us all in 2023. Cheers -
Cliff